The United States men’s World Cup campaign ended with a whimper in the summer, and the finger-pointing that followed landed on a familiar target: the “pay-to-play” system and the economic barriers that keep a large pool of players out of elite youth soccer. The US Under-20 women’s lackluster World Cup showing in September did little to calm the mood, with clubs refusing to release players — or, more broadly, Fifa’s failure to schedule such tournaments in appropriate windows — offered as partial explanations. The results were not an outlier when set alongside other recent US youth performances.
None of this is a new complaint. At a May 2022 conference call announcing a collective bargaining agreement that effectively ended the “equal pay” saga, players were asked how they would build bridges with grassroots organizers who, in anger over perceived slights, had come close to restoring Carlos Cordeiro to US Soccer’s presidency shortly after he resigned under heavy pressure. The players fell silent. On social media, the suggestion that US Soccer should pay its able-bodied national teams a little less and redistribute more toward development — as happens in more successful soccer countries — was met with hostility, the heavily memed Simpsons line “Won’t somebody please think of the children?!” serving as a typical response.
In the years since, the debate has been yanked from one overarching fix to another. Claudio Reyna, then US Soccer’s youth technical director, unveiled a curriculum at the 2011 NSCAA convention — now United Soccer Coaches — heavily influenced by Barcelona’s tiki-taka approach. Three years later, at the same convention, a session wrestled with how to reconcile the curricula of three different organizations. In 2018, after the men failed to qualify for the World Cup, the loudest voices were the nine candidates who sought US Soccer’s presidency.
In 2026 the most prominent voice raising the alarm is US women’s coach Emma Hayes, whose record of success at Chelsea and the gold medal she won with the US women at the 2024 Olympics gives her argument weight.
Structural obstacles make the American problem harder than most. In Germany, if the DFB wants to embark on a sweeping overhaul such as the heralded “Das Reboot” of the early 2010s, it can simply do so. US Soccer does not hold that power, and it does not have the money either — especially given a country so vast that a US equivalent of Germany’s regional training-center system would be impossible.
The cost barrier is the issue most of the US soccer community agrees on. Affordable soccer does exist: recreational soccer costs roughly the same as youth clubs in England, Spain, Germany and other established soccer nations; professional academies are generally free, at least in the men’s game; and most high school teams cost nothing for anyone who can make the squad. Participation levels have roared back to life since the pandemic. The problem sits in the middle tier that is largely unique to the USA — “travel” soccer, which runs anywhere from the low four figures to the low five figures and is the only tier that matters to professional and college scouts. College and pro coaches may talk a good game about lowering barriers to entry, but they and their scouts are notably absent from the high school and recreational games that supposedly harbor thousands of outstanding players who cannot pay for travel soccer.
Travel soccer nonetheless appeals to families: the uniforms draw in kids, the games are better because those with no aptitude are weeded out at tryouts, and the whole thing is a social endeavor for children and parents who wear long drives and depleted bank accounts as badges of honor. It also generates money that might not otherwise be available — money that funds suitable fields and scholarships for players who could not take part without financial help. Dismantling that structure, then, will be difficult; reform is the more realistic route, in part by limiting the “travel” element of travel soccer.
Some incremental progress is under way. US Soccer is starting to tame the alphabet soup of youth organizations by integrating with US Youth Soccer, which had already joined forces with rival US Club Soccer to fold a couple of redundant competitions into the new National 1 League. That should make it easier for neighboring clubs to play each other rather than traveling farther afield, and it may end the endless arguments over which “elite” league in a given area is really more elite.
Working out exactly how much US Soccer invests in youth development rather than senior national teams is not straightforward. The federation spends well into nine figures on its “national teams,” a category that stretches from the able-bodied men’s and women’s sides to youth squads, futsal, beach soccer, deaf soccer, 7-a-side soccer for players with cerebral palsy or similar conditions, and power soccer for players in electric wheelchairs. What is clear is that US Soccer hands its players 80% of World Cup prize money, while other federations take a majority of their winnings and reinvest it into development so they can come back and beat the USA again at the next tournament. The federation also runs a grant program that is not particularly well funded: its 2025 tax filing shows nearly $4m in grant money over the fiscal year — less than it spent to pay five members of the women’s team. An offshoot foundation, Soccer Forward, is aimed at channeling the legacy of the World Cups and Olympics being hosted in the USA from 2026 through 2031 toward the next generation, and its biggest endeavor so far is “Soccer at Schools,” which aspires to make soccer possible in every school in the United States. That would mark a major shift for a youth soccer culture that has been divorcing itself from schools for decades — and it is a sensible idea on a basic level, given that every child in the country goes to school while only a handful can afford travel soccer.
The hardest task, though, is sustaining the interest in fixing any of it. If youth development is given the priority it deserves, the country can overcome some — not all — of the challenges it faces as a sprawling nation where soccer is not the most popular sport. If the soccer community only springs into action after every World Cup defeat and otherwise sneers at the idea that the youth game matters, the game will stagnate. Or worse.